Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 14:14:15 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: Lou,  what is getting over you?   Some advice


On Tue, 20 Aug 1996, Louis R Godena wrote:

> 
> Lou,  your posts re Hans Ehrbar,  Malecki,  Carlisle, TimW et al,  have me
> wondering.    If,  indeed,  there is a Moon over Miami,  what must
> Manhattan's sky look like nowadays?     
> 
> You need a rest,  Lou.
> 

Louis: Nothing came over me. I've felt this way for months. The Spoons
Administrators, except for Hans, are ready to make a clean sweep of the
lists. I'm sort of waiting for Jon Beasley-Murray, who started the Marxism
list, to get back from vacation and post some kind of proposal to the
list. Hans loves the list just the way it is while everybody else in
Spoons wants to flush it down the toilet.

I suppose I won't be jumping the gun to tell you what I think is needed.
This anarchistic, postmodernist attitude towards Marxism has to stop.
Spoon Administrators love things that are unstructured, just like
themselves. This means that decisions are made at the last moment and
usually without much rhyme or reason. When Lisa Rogers decided to set up a
"friends of Lisa" list, otherwise known as Marxism 2, this was done on the
spur of the moment and without consulting anybody outside of Spoon.

I am used to leadership and structure myself. If the Vietnam antiwar
movement functioned like this list, then the main street in Hanoi would be
called Kissinger Way.

I am not for excluding any significant current of thought. What I do want
to exclude the occasional nut-job (or provocateur) from AOL stopping by
and wreaking havoc as Ostrakha did. I also want to make it clear to people
enfatuated with themselves like Robert Malecki that the list is not an
appropriate place for the poems or memoirs. Keep that shit on your
personal web page and don't burden us with it.

I don't think the list is an appropriate place for lengthy cross-postings
>from other magazines. I didn't really get interested in the PCP until I
started reading Adolfo's messages carefully. I completely resent 10 New
Flag reposts a day. Or Shawgi Tell's 78 part series on the wonders of
Joseph Stalin. Or the Bougainville posts for that matter. Let Sasha Baer
take 10 minutes and put all that into some kind of context, that's what's
needed.

The plain fact of the matter is that some really interesting people became
alienated from the list. It is truly sad that Paul Cockshott is no longer
here. He was "for" Stalin and Mao, but I was closer to him politically 
than just about anybody on the list. He was on briefly a couple of months
ago and split. "Too much crap", he told me.

The big problem we face is that the list is torn this direction and that
by strong-willed individuals on the list who have an agenda other than
discussing Marxist politics and theory dispassionately, who are just
"intervening" here. I mean, what the fuck is MIM? What is that all about?
If it was up to me, all the bogus party names would disappear immediately.
Adolfo Olaechea was right about this. These ridiculous names like Pat #3
or "Neil" are sophomorish. The CIA knows where everybody and anybody is.
All these sorts of anonymous names are good for is building a wall around
the sender. The list should be good for breaking down walls, not
maintaining them.

The problem we have is that the Spoons Administrator's committment to
Marxism is about the same as their committment to Foucault or Deleuze or
Bataille. This is a problem because there has to be a place where the
Marxist current internationally can discuss among themselves and it can
not rely on a bunch of feckless, anarchistic, postmodernists for support.

This is all I have to say on the subject for the time being.





     --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---